Web/Tech – Don't Gel Too Soon

Death in Orlando and What Else We Could Lose

In the room backs 1 cropped — Pre-Summit “Builders’ Day” where leaders of all races and generations share findings and innovations

Tattoos, weird clothes, tee shirts with funny pictures on them, pink hair, long hair, scruffy hair, sticker-saturated computers — and brilliance, geek humor, and deep respect for one another over generation, gender, gender identification, religion and race: that was what I saw last week at the Internet Archive Decentralized Web Summit* — called partly to discuss the technology and ethical questions behind an increasingly centralized Web.

I kept thinking all weekend about this diverse crew of genius conference attendees as the horror of the Orlando shootings unfolded. With it will come the inevitable racial and religious generalizations and this international crew of brainiacs included probably 20% who, because of name or skin color or accent face a higher likelihood of reflexive suspicion, potential online monitoring, extra security checks at airports, and frightened glances in elevators, Starbuck’s and movie lines.

Over the next weeks and months, we must decide how our country should respond to what is clearly an increasing threat, especially since mainstream security experts have implied a need for more surveillance, not only in person and through interviews but also online.

I have no answers and am barely fluent in the technologies powering these surveillance tools so there’s very little I can add either to this question or the sad jeopardy into which it may place so many of my new conference friends. For me though, it’s another – and very important – ripple in the pool of our outrage.

*New Connections
We are bringing together a diverse group of Web architects, activists, engineers, archivists, scholars, journalists, and other stakeholders to explore the technology required to build a Decentralized Web and its impact.

Call to action
The current Web is not private or censorship-free. It lacks a memory, a way to preserve our culture’s digital record through time. The Decentralized Web aims to make the Web open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control.

Big Birthday Memory #19: Thanks to the Man Who Sent Me to BlogHer ’06 and Now It’s ’14 and I’m Still Showing Up

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from August 2, 2014.

David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.

Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:

1. Access to an entirely new world of remarkablewomen (and men too.) Including ( a little bit of a yearbook list) Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and Morra Aarons-Mele and Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann and Liz Gumbinner and Kristen Chase and Asha Dornfest and Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite and Mary Spivey Tsao and Danielle Wileyand people I haven’t mentioned here (Sorry – some I’m notcompletely sure who I met in 2006 and who later.) Feels like I’ve known you all forever as well as Sarah Granger and Kelly Wickham and Jill Miller Zimon and Joanne Bamberger andStacey Ferguson and Cynthia Liu and Anita Sarah Jackson andJenn Pozner and Cheryl Contee (and and and) And that doesn’t count the new (to me) folks like Sharon Hodor Greenthal!.

2. An entirely new way to communicate and create.

3. More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:

4. Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.

Lots of boomer women have joined me and the other early birds each year and I am certain they feel the same way (I’ve asked several and besides they’ve written about it.) At a time when many of our friends are settling into a more and more peer-centered life, we have the gift of having broadened, rather than narrowed, our world and hearing the voices of women we never would have known about, much less known for real. So David, thank you for the gift of my entry into this universe and for the imagination and vision that opened your mind to its possibilities. It’s a beautiful place to hang out and I’ll always remember who sent me through the door.

The Internet of Women: 1996 But No One Would Listen

Ada cartoon — Ada Lovelace, Computing Pioneer

Women were always going to thrive on the Internet. Connecting, enabling connections among others, sharing information and more importantly, support and wisdom — these are some of the reasons we belonged online from the beginning. I knew it as soon as I saw my first browser, Mosaic (later Netscape) in the early 90s.

After early obscurity, women have become more and more visible and successful online, not only creating content but entire media operations. Numbered among them were the pioneering iVillage and BlogHer and agencies like Clever Girls, Blogalicious, Women and Work, Sway Group, and The Motherhood. There are plenty more.

When I saw this story today about the emerging Internet of Women, led by Cisco’s Monique J. Morrow, I’ll admit I got a little sad. I had tried to write a handbook (Internet Bootcamp) for women online in 1996. A friend hooked me up with a celebrity agent I could have never enlisted on my own, and my proposal went to some serious publishers. The response – and I wish I still had the precise language, was that the writing was “engaging” but women would never buy such a book. I just pulled it to take a look and am posting it here. See what you think. If nothing else it will evoke memories of modems past.

Here is Morrow’s basic message: (We agree, right?)

From connected homes and cars to monitoring our health through smart devices, a woman’s view point in this new age of digitization has never been more critical.

I invite you to follow our publication, the Internet of Women and be part of this movement.

iPhone Bummers – Lyft Too. First-World Problems – But a Big Pain

OK so today we each “updated” our iPhones from 5 to 6s. They are very cool. However. Rick has spent most of the afternoon trying to get iCloud to update so he can move his data to his new phone. It keeps stalling. Apple people are very nice and helpful and took over his screen and everything but no one can get the damn thing to update iCloud and it’s tough to move without that step. We think he’s going to have to do everything by hand.

Meanwhile I, happily fooling around on the bus with my own new 6s, which did load successfully, accidentally ordered a Lyft ride (it seems that the app screen has a hair trigger.) It was impossible to get any Lyft people on the phone so I could cancel it. Our driver called me and said No worries – he understood – but that if we didn’t officially cancel we’d be charged. However. The cancel key doesn’t work.

All embarrassingly stupid stuff in a world that seems to be crumbling around us. I think I’m only writing this to yell at myself for caring about such dumb stuff.

I feel better already.

NaBloPoMo and the Cold November Rain

And it’s hard to hold a candle In the cold November rain — Guns N’ Roses

We’re on our way now- committed to NaBloPoMo*: the pledge to post every day in the month of November. Needing the discipline of a public pledge, I’ve taken it on. November: the month when my second son and first daughter-in-law arrived on the planet, when I first saw Africa, when the hero of my youth died in Dallas; the month of Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and the launch of Queen Elizabeth’s record-setting reign. So much has happened in this month that ends with our beloved Thanksgiving.

There’s plenty to talk about: a Presidential election that’s precisely a year away, an unprecedented assault on women’s rights, faith, grief, the vagaries of our popular culture, families, grandparents, holidays, admired friends, books, music, movies and the world in general. Oh, and the wonderful work of the women whom I’ve joined on this adventure. You can find them all here.
*National Blog Posting Month

My Friend Laurie: the Post I Never Wanted to Write

“Inside you someplace” laughed my friend Laurie, “lives a 16-year-old boy!” We were talking about cyber fiction; I was trying to explain my attraction to this geeky, otherworldly material to the only person who would really understand what I was talking about.

I’ve known her since the early 80s, when I produced her appearance on TODAY; she had come to discuss her masterful LA Times Salvadoran death squads series. Our friendship deepened in the years I lived in LA, her long-time home. We were both major Web freaks. After all, both of our minds bounced around like the facts on the Web (often to the confusion of those with whom we were speaking.) We were struggling to, between us, get enough information to understand how this astounding Internet worked. Laurie found The Electronic Cafe, an arts space in Santa Monica that hosted speakers ranging from the EP of The Legend of Zelda to the founder of Earthlink. We were on our way. It was thrilling.

We never stopped talking when we were together – circling around topics, bouncing to other ones then back to the first — or third. We never got lost and were always intoxicated by the messy exchange that was our conversation, sometimes joined by her husband Henry Weinstein and their daughter Elizabeth.

They were, Laurie called it, “a triad.” From the beginning Elizabeth was an active partner in their lives; the “adult” events, the travel, the baseball, the cooking and, lucky for all of us, the time spent with parental pals. The three of them were a beautiful thing.

When she decided high school journalists needed more resources, she founded, from sheer determination (i.e. with hardly any money) Associated Student Press, to help high school reporters learn the rules, skills and sheer joy of journalism. I worked with her on a couple of their events, including a high school journalism convention, and it was so great; the kids loved it. We did too. I knew the depth of her affinity for teenagers because she had become a real friend and mentor, quite independent of us, to our younger son. It was a friendship he treasures to this day. She and Henry came to his wedding.

Laurie Becklund died on February 8th of metastatic breast cancer. She used every reporting skill she’d ever learned to locate experts, treatment and allies and I believe extended her life through her fierce determination. In the past year, she applied that determination to advocacy for people with advanced disease and the need for “big data” tools to aggregate and parse new information and the effect of new treatments to help find trends and flaws in treatments, drugs and drug trials. She also challenged researchers, in talks and in person “We have the cells to help your research. Use us.” She called her campaign Use Us or Lose Us.

(I’m telling you about her post-newspaper years. You can read about Laurie as an award-winning journalist here in this LATimes profile and other stories that will, I’m sure, keep coming.)

On the day she finally told me that her cancer had returned, Laurie sat in my car as we drove out of the driveway and said “Don’t put the sun visor down. I don’t want to waste any chances to look at the trees.” As I struggle to write this post, I think of that afternoon and her hunger for everything from a beautiful view to a cool new technology to visit to a new country to a personal story gleaned from a conversation. She was full of courage and curiosity and loyalty; she was a gifted mother and wife and friend; she was — Laurie.

We are about to leave for Los Angeles for her memorial service. I have been so haunted and sad; it’s very hard to write this. I’m hoping to find some — some something — as we join what I know will be a crowd of people who Laurie, Henry and Elizabeth so generously included in their lives. When I told one friend how sad I was, she wrote “I wish you comfort in your memories.” Yes.

The traditional Jewish version is “May her memory be a blessing.” That it certainly is.

That’s How I Got to Memphis – Music and the News

Will, Charlie's grandson and Jim sing That's How I Got to Memphis — Will, Charlie’s grandson and Jim sing That’s How I Got to Memphis

Stuck in my head ever since the end of The Newsroom, this song really seems to want to spend today with me, which would be fine if it didn’t make me so sad.

It won’t matter much if you didn’t like the show, or if music doesn’t carry you forward and back or if you don’t mourn the decline of integrity as a core value of journalism, but the use of it at a funeral for Charlie Skinner, (Sam Waterston,) the keeper of the flame, the leader who defended the honor of every journalist and story, is a spectacular metaphor. YouTube won’t let me embed it, but here it is if you have the patience to link, it’s worth it.

Aaron Sorkin says Charlie represented the loss of decency offered by each of us to the rest of us, but for me, as Newsroom closed down, he stood for the rules that made journalism credible and critical to our country*; rules eroded in surrender to commerce and coarseness and fear. Even so, The Newsroom closed with the first moment of yet another day’s show. As Sorkin said, “They’re going to keep doing the news.” It will, though, be with the loss of just a little more of the combination of honor and power, the Charlie Skinner, that had protected them, and us, for so long.

*The Atlantic called it a funeral for “old media” but I’ve lived in “new media” for decades now and the show wasn’t about that change – at least not to me.

Ada Lovelace, Al Gore, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Google and Where They Took Us All

You know what? Not only did Al Gore never say that he invented the Internet, but he was one of its best advocates and understood the importance of the slew of people who really did. They’re part of a surprisingly exciting and remarkable story told by Walter Isaacson in The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. It’s a fast-paced tour through the evolution of modern technology, from the prophetic work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (aka Lord Byron’s daughter) through the first computers, programming, the unsung (big surprise) but enormous contribution made by women technologists, transistors, microchips, video games, the Internet and the Web, as well as personal computees to access it. The story is pretty amazing and yes, inspiring.

The people behind these developments, and the process that carried them, provide a rich narrative and a couple of surprising through-lines. First, about patents and Nobel prizes: the men (and women) who brought us from The Difference Engine to the microchip to the Internet of Everything were not hoarders. Although many of them received patents and made money from their work, rather than withholding developments, most shared them, even precise details. They collaborated to build upon the genius of the ones before. Secondly, much of their work, basic development and science as well as more sophisticated details, was funded by governments; a lot of the American work was funded under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He saw American science leadership as a national security issue, and, as we consider what emerged from that federal funding, it’s hard to argue.

There are dozens of anecdotes as well as illuminating biographical profiles in The Innovators, including Alan Turing, currently played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the highly anticipated film The Imitation Game (Isaacson interviews the cast below). Each story is a worthy candidate for inclusion here. Better though, that like these heroic creators of what became our present and future, you read the book and discover them for yourself.

Big Change for BlogHer: A NABLOPOMO Recollection

SheKnows_team — R- L from top R: BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone, SheKnows’ Philippe Guelton and Samantha Skey, and BlogHer co-founders Jory Des Jardins and Elisa Camahort Page

BlogHer has merged with SheKnows, as Lisa Stone and and AdAge announced this morning. Since 2006 the wonder that is BlogHer has been a central part of my life. On this NABLOPOMO day 3, here’s why*:

In 2006, I was working with David Aylward and the National Strategies firm. He doesn’t know this but there’s a story (If you know me you know there’s almost always a story.) We had a client who wanted to reach parents. David hired me to help and I had this big idea about making a parent website to promote them. Well. David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.

Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:

1. Access to an entirely new world of remarkable women (and men too.) Including ( a little bit of a yearbook list) Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and Morra Aarons-Mele and Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann and Liz Gumbinner and Kristen Chase and Asha Dornfest and Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite and Mary Spivey Tsao and Danielle Wiley and people I haven’t mentioned here (Sorry – some I’m not completely sure who I met in 2006 and who later.) Feels like I’ve known you all forever as well as Sarah Granger and Kelly Wickham and Jill Miller Zimon and Joanne Bamberger and Stacey Ferguson and Cynthia Liu and Anita Sarah Jackson and Jenn Pozner and Cheryl Contee (and and and) And that doesn’t count the new (to me) folks like Sharon Hodor Greenthal!.

2. An entirely new way to communicate and create.

3. More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:

4. Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.

*This post first appeared on August 2, 2014.

Every Day for a Month – You, Me and WordPress

Well here we are again! A post a day, all month. Last time I tried this was 7 (seven!) years ago. Then, as now, Sabbath observance meant that I couldn’t post on Saturdays or Friday nights so I scheduled weekend posts in advance. After today I will do so again — but for this, the first day, I’ll just declare my presence as the sabbath departs.

It’s exciting to be part of Nablopomo again. May we all celebrate one another’s adventures, observations and ideas. Oh and a sad farewell to Daylight Savings Time!